The Funnel: Old Friend, False Comfort, or Foe?

1. Introduction: The Funnel That Won’t Go Away

I don’t like the marketing funnel. I really do not like it. Every time I see one, I feel a little like Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, wanting to put my head in a bucket of water.

And yet, I’ll admit it—there was a time when I happily built marketing plans around it. Awareness, Consideration, Conversion. Neatly color-coded. A reassuring sense of order amidst the chaos of consumer behaviour. It felt good—like we’d cracked it. Over time, though, I started to feel uneasy. I saw how this neatness could lead even brilliant marketers astray. Budgets skewed towards short-term metrics. Creativity squeezed out by the demand for instant results. And yet, the funnel clings on—part comfort blanket, part straightjacket.

Or maybe I’m just being over-sensitive. There are definitely people at MG OMD who roll their eyes when I once again call out my dislike for funnels—so in a way, this piece is a bit like therapy. Perhaps I’ve just spent too long staring at nine-box advertising strategy charts and media flowcharts, and I’m mistaking my personal irritation for an existential marketing crisis.

But I don’t think I am. This piece isn’t another obituary for the funnel—there are plenty of those. I want to ask: Why does it cling on? Is it truly damaging, or just an annoying but harmless relic? And as AI begins to reshape how consumers make decisions, could this finally be what allows us to pack the funnel away for good?

2. The Funnel’s Staying Power

The funnel’s longevity is not accidental; it thrives because it meets fundamental human and organizational needs. We cling to it for reasons that are entirely understandable—even if, deep down, we know it’s not quite right.

• Cognitive Simplicity: We are all looking for ways to make sense of complexity. The funnel offers a comforting illusion of control—a step-by-step guide through the swirling chaos of consumer behaviour. It’s the marketing equivalent of alphabetizing your spice rack. It might not make dinner taste any better, but it feels like progress. As Mark Ritson often reminds us, frameworks can be useful, even when they are flawed.

• Internal Storytelling: I’ve seen the funnel slide land better in senior meetings than the actual strategy. It gives non-marketers a roadmap, something to latch onto when the rest of the marketing discussion starts sounding like a foreign language. Boards and CFOs struggle with ambiguity, but they understand a journey from awareness to conversion.

• Measurability: Digital platforms fuel our obsession with the lower funnel because that’s where the easy data lives. Clicks, conversions—numbers you can plot on a graph. It’s far easier to justify a media spend when you can point to immediate results, but as Les Binet and Peter Field’s work shows, this short-term bias can starve long-term brand health. Even in more holistic approaches like Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM), we often bias towards short-term conversions. Understanding and forecasting long-term impacts is too often an afterthought—an addition to the analysis rather than the norm. And let’s be honest—we’ve all sent that smug email with a post-campaign graph showing a bump in conversions, hoping no one asks about what it means for the next quarter.

• Agency Convenience: I’ve been that person—building a deck where the funnel shape nicely divided up the media plan. Awareness at the top, consideration in the middle, conversion at the bottom. It’s neat, it looks good, and it’s easy to sell. But neatness doesn’t always equal effectiveness.

• Platform and Tool Reinforcement: The very systems we rely on to plan, buy, and measure advertising reinforce funnel logic. Ad platforms structure campaign objectives around stages like 'awareness' and 'conversion,' and many reporting dashboards push us toward tracking lower-funnel outputs. This institutionalizes the funnel into the infrastructure of modern marketing.

So, we keep the funnel around. It’s familiar. It makes meetings easier. It helps us explain things to people who don’t live and breathe marketing. In that context, you can see why it’s hard to let go—even when we know we probably should.

3. Are Funnels Actively Harmful—or Just Wrong?

False Certainty

Funnels encourage the belief that consumers progress linearly through distinct stages. Worse still, they create a false hierarchy—implying that the bottom of the funnel is somehow more valuable than the top. This fuels the fixation on conversion metrics, leading us to prioritise immediate action over the harder, longer-term work of building brand salience and mental availability. In reality, decision-making is messy and non-linear. Research by Karen Nelson-Field highlights the importance of mental availability at unpredictable buying moments, contradicting the funnel’s orderly progression.

The funnel lets us pretend consumers obediently queue up through neat stages, when the truth is closer to an episode of Supermarket Sweep—people racing through the aisles, grabbing whatever stands out, for example large inflatable bananas, before dashing to the checkout.

Attempts to ‘shortcut’ the funnel or manipulate its shape often double down on bad decision-making. Instead of challenging the flawed assumptions behind it, these approaches reinforce the false belief that consumers can be engineered neatly through a fixed process. The result? A more complex version of the same problem—where marketing focuses on optimising imaginary steps rather than embracing the reality of how brands grow.

Misallocated Budgets

The pursuit of measurable bottom-funnel outcomes has led to a disproportionate focus on short-term performance channels. Binet and Field’s seminal work on planning for short and long-term impacts shows that over-investment in activation undermines sustainable growth. The result is often a kind of marketing diet that’s all sugar and no substance—satisfying in the moment, but ultimately leaving the brand undernourished.

Stunted Advertising and Marketing Development

The ease of measuring clicks and conversions or top of mind awareness has shifted industry focus toward what is easy to measure, not what matters. This has come at the expense of developing better understanding and tools for:

• Building Fame and Salience: The work of Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute demonstrates that mental availability and brand-building drive long-term success.

• Category Entry Points (CEPs): Sharp’s concept emphasizes ensuring a brand comes to mind in diverse buying situations. Funnels often reduce this rich behavioural complexity to a bland ‘consideration’ phase, weakening planning tools.

We’ve all been guilty of it—spending weeks finessing a programmatic buying dashboard while treating creative development or exploring new Category Entry Points like an optional yoga class we’ll ‘get around to’ one day.—like being irrationally annoyed by Comic Sans. But the problem is, it’s not just wrong; it can lead to some truly terrible decisions.

I have clearly failed at being measured and positive in considering funnels; however, future developments do give me cause for optimism. Those of us in the effectiveness community also need to hold our hands up. We haven’t always made the case clearly enough for what removing funnels and reducing short-term reliance actually delivers in tangible business benefit. If we want marketers to move on, we need to be better at telling that story and better using the tools at our disposal.

4. AI’s Potential to Break the Funnel

I know, AI is everywhere. Depending on which conference panel you last attended, it’s either saving marketing or destroying it. But, for once, I actually feel a bit hopeful. AI might just help us finally let go of the funnel.

Disrupting the Journey

AI-powered systems are increasingly reimagining the customer journey and highlighting new purchase paths. When my kids shout at Alexa for the 12th time to play Imagine Dragons, it’s not a ‘consideration phase’—it’s a voice-powered impulse trigger waiting to happen. From Amazon’s ‘Buy Again’ buttons to smart fridges reordering milk, AI systems often skip the research phase and jump straight to buying.

New Pathways to Choice

Consumer journeys have always been messy, but AI is making that clearer than ever. Behavioural data and machine learning expose the reality that we don’t progress neatly from awareness to purchase—we zigzag, backtrack, and often make choices based on convenience, context, or whatever’s in front of us. Rory Sutherland frequently reminds us that human behaviour is delightfully unpredictable—AI is simply putting that unpredictability under a spotlight.

Optimized Media and Decision-Making

AI’s potential isn’t just in consumer tools—it’s changing how we plan and execute advertising. AI-powered platforms are shifting toward probabilistic models, optimizing for reach, attention, and salience, rather than forcing people through an artificial staged path. These systems can help us focus on maximizing the chance of a brand being chosen at any given moment, rather than plotting an imaginary journey through a funnel. AI systems have the potential to restructure decision-making entirely—adding, removing, and adapting Category Entry Points (CEPs) and buying moments in ways we are only just beginning to understand.

Optimized Content Creation

AI also offers the ability to scale both human and machine creativity, enabling the production of highly varied assets across existing and emerging formats. From dynamic video variations to personalized ad iterations, AI can generate and test creative executions at a scale previously unimaginable. This opens up new possibilities for tailoring messaging to different contexts, moments, and platforms—aligning more closely with the probabilistic, context-driven future of marketing.

This isn’t to say AI is a silver bullet—it won’t fix bad strategy or bad creative. But it might finally give us the nudge we need to replace rigid models with approaches that reflect how people actually buy.

5. What Should Replace the Funnel?

For all my complaining, I know we can’t just rip up every model and hope for the best. We need a model that not only helps us understand and shape marketing effectiveness but also enables us to tell compelling stories about what marketing and advertising deliver to businesses. We need something to guide us—but it has to work with reality, not fight against it.

Mental, Physical, and Algorithmic Availability

The best foundation we have remains Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s work on mental and physical availability. Being the brand that comes to mind when people need you, and making sure your product is easy to find when they reach that moment—these principles are evidence-based and, crucially, they reflect how people actually buy.

Category Entry Points (CEPs) build on this, offering a practical way to embed availability into real-world buying moments. Ensuring availability isn’t just about being ‘present’—it’s about aligning with the moments and contexts where people are likely to think about your brand. Purchases aren’t driven by a predictable funnel but by triggers—often fleeting, sometimes unexpected—that prompt a buying decision. Instead of nudging people through a staged process, we should be identifying and reinforcing those cues that lead people to our brands.

But as AI systems increasingly shape consumer decision-making, availability is evolving beyond the human mind. So I would like to be bold and suggest a third component algorithmic availability, ensuring brands are not only thought of by people but also prioritized by the systems that guide their choices. As AI-powered search engines, recommendation engines, and smart assistants filter consumer decisions, brands must ensure they are visible, trusted, and favourably positioned within these systems. Algorithmic Availability is about ensuring your brand is accessible and recommendable within these environments—be that search algorithms, retail platforms, or AI assistants—becoming a crucial addition to the modern marketer’s toolkit. Being the brand that comes to mind when people need you, and making sure your product is easy to find when they reach that moment—these principles are evidence-based and, crucially, they reflect how people actually buy.

Probabilistic, Not Linear, Thinking

If there’s one thing we should all embrace, it’s that marketing is a game of increasing probabilities, not guaranteeing outcomes. Success lies in maximizing the chance that our brand will be thought of and bought when it matters. There is no neat path to conversion—just a web of moments and contexts we need to be ready for.

So, what replaces the funnel? A mental model rooted in availability and probability—one that acknowledges that our job is not to push people down steps but to show up, repeatedly, in the right places, so that when the inflatable banana moment arrives, we’re the brand they grab.

This isn’t perfection. It’s pragmatism. But it’s the best we’ve got—and it works.

6. Conclusion: Embracing Complexity Without Losing Clarity

It’s easy to see why the funnel endures. Marketers need clarity. We need ways to communicate what we do to colleagues who don’t spend their lives thinking about salience, reach, and response curves. The funnel gives us that—but at a cost.

I know I’ve spent a lot of this piece venting my frustrations, but I’m hopeful. We have better tools and better thinking available. As AI reshapes consumer behaviour and our tools improve, we have an opportunity to move beyond models that oversimplify. The challenge is to find a new balance—building frameworks that reflect reality without losing the clarity that helps us drive action. That’s not easy. But it is necessary. We need models that work with human behaviour, not against it. Marketing isn’t a funnel, and it never was. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we can employ something better.

References

• Binet, Les & Field, Peter – The Long and the Short of It: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies

• Sharp, Byron – How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know (Ehrenberg-Bass Institute)

• Nelson-Field, Karen – The Attention Economy and How Media Works

• Ritson, Mark – Various works and commentaries on marketing frameworks

• Sutherland, Rory – Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

• Russell, Bertrand – The Problems of Philosophy (Referenced in the article’s discussion of measurement)

• Adams, Douglas – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (For the Marvin the Paranoid Android reference)

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